


Hey, Natasha? Merry Christmas.

by TeyrianTimelord



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Christmas Fluff, F/M, M/M, Mostly Platonic, Post-Civil War (Marvel), SO FLUFFY, buckynat if you want it to be, clint has the farm and the family, stucky if you want it to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 13:22:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8981590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeyrianTimelord/pseuds/TeyrianTimelord
Summary: Natasha and Bucky both find themselves without their best friends on Christmas, and make due the best they can.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I was in need of some holiday fluff, so I spent the last two days writing this monstrosity. Enjoy!

_“What… what is this?”_

_“Consider it payback for all those years you and your parents took me in for Christmas.”_

_Bucky stood in awe, all traces of sleep now gone from his eyes, gazing in wonder at the overload of holiday kitsch Steve had somehow managed to put up overnight. His entire living room was covered floor to ceiling in tacky decorations and so many strings of lights that the circuit might short out at any moment. A tree just barely small enough to fit through the door was propped up in the center of the room, fully decked and surrounded with messily wrapped presents. Though Bucky’s memories of childhood were still mostly lost in a Hydra-induced haze, he recalled clear as day how seriously his mother used to take Christmas decorating, and Steve had recreated her spirit almost exactly. He could do nothing but stand and stare. And try not to cry._

_Steve interrupted the crashing waves of emotion by placing a hand on his shoulder._

_“I wanted to make sure your first Christmas back was special. I know how much it used to mean to you.”_

_Bucky wanted to say something. He desperately needed to put into words the overwhelming amount of gratitude he owed Steve, not just for the dazzling display but for everything he had done since bringing him back from Hydra. Over the years, Bucky had done enough to warrant his own death ten times over, including the murder of one of Steve’s closest friends. He could have let him rot in Bucharest, and there were some days Bucky thought he should have. But this… this was one huge, complete, physical manifestation of all the grace Steve willingly gave and Bucky did not deserve. He wanted to say something, anything, to sum up everything reeling through his head. Instead, he turned and wrapped his arms around Steve, hoping all gratefulness would transfer through the embrace._

_“Thank you,” he finally forced himself to murmur. That’s all he really could say._

_He could feel the soft rumble of laughter in Steve’s chest, and he felt more at home than any point since regaining most of his mind._

_“Don’t thank me yet. I still have cookies in the oven and there’s a good chance they might kill us both.”_

_***_

_Natasha was used to bitter cold. Too many times she had watched other Red Room trainees bite off their own frostbitten fingers after test missions gone wrong in the wilds of Siberia because they knew their instructors would do so much worse if they went to the doctors for treatment. Even in the dead of night, the crisp December air practically felt like a summer breeze, and she was indescribably glad to be in Istanbul instead of Novosibirsk. Clint, however, did not look as pleased. While she was perfectly warm in her thin jacket and gauzy scarf, he was bundled up tightly enough to survive a week long trek through the Alps._

_“You know it’s barely below freezing, right?” she finally said without looking up from her spotting scope, breaking the hour long silence that had grown between them._

_“We weren’t all born in the arctic, Romanoff,” he grumbled._

_Nat cocked an eyebrow. She had not expected him to be all sunshine and roses on their first mission together, but for a man who had risked his entire career to bring her over to SHIELD, he was being unnecessarily sour._

_“Do we have a problem, Barton?”_

_He sighed and lifted his face from the rifle stock._

_“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped. I just wasn’t expecting to spend Christmas on a rooftop in Turkey. Fury promised I could visit my family this season but changed his mind at the last second.”_

_A family? His file listed him as an orphan with an estranged brother. Still, she wasn’t so surprised. Everyone in their line of work had secrets, and a family was nowhere near the worst she had come across in partners throughout the years. However, she did scoff._

_“Haven’t you been in this line of work long enough to know holidays are irrelevant? I’ve never celebrated Christmas.”_

_While she expected him to retaliate against her judgement, instead he gave her a perplexed stare._

_“You’ve never celebrated Christmas? Ever?”_

_She shrugged._

_“No. When my parents were alive, Christmas was still outlawed by the Soviet regime. By the time it became popular again, I was in the Red Room and they definitely didn’t let us have holidays.”_

_Clint continued to stare at her for another several long seconds, almost to the point of becoming unnerving, before finally returning his attention to his sniper setup. They sat there for a few more hours, remaining silent until the sun just began to peak over the Grand Bazaar. Finally, their target came into view of the window they had been watching intently._

_“Hey, Tasha, when we finish cleaning this up, do you want to go shopping?”_

_“Why would I want to go shopping?”_

_“So I can buy you a Christmas present.”_

_***_

Though the bottom floors of Avengers Tower were still bustling with non-Christian and family-less Stark Industries employees and the most dedicated of SHIELD support staff, the penthouse resident floors reserved for the Avengers themselves were practically a ghost town. Steve had taken Bucky back to his apartment in Brooklyn for their annual, traditional small Christmas. Thor was visiting Chicago with Jane to meet her parents. Sharon had gone to England to spend the holidays with her cousins. Sam was home with his mother to help organize the massive week-long Christmas party that took place in her house every year. Vision volunteered to take Wanda back to Sokovia to celebrate the traditional Chanukah she had grown up around and missed so desperately since coming to America. Rhodey decided to say “screw Christmas” and go lounge on a beach in Aruba for the week. Even Tony was taking this season to take Pepper on a vacation in an attempt to fix the cracks in their relationship. While it seemed to be the perfect little Christmas for most of the team, Natasha was sitting alone on the roof, her legs dangling over the edge above the New York streets below, drinking Stolichnaya Elit out of the bottle and counting the snowflakes landing on her pants.

This was the first Christmas in 8 years that she wasn’t stranded in a foreign country with Clint, taking out a target on the night of 24th then spending the whole next day shopping together for the kitschiest items they could find for each other. Now that they were technically no longer employed by SHIELD, he was free to spend the holidays with his family, and even though he had been adamant about inviting her to join them, she knew she couldn’t trespass on their first Christmas together in almost a decade. Yes, their little tradition was the only Christmas she had ever known, but that didn’t matter compared to the joy she knew Clint’s kids would feel when they woke up to find their daddy next to the tree for the first time in their lives. Their happiness mattered more. She had survived more Decembers alone than she could count; she could survive this one too.

“What are you doing here?”

Natasha didn’t have to turn around to know who the voice belonged to, but she was still surprised. There was only one person alive who could sneak up on her, and he was supposed to be in Brooklyn with his best friend.

Ever since coming back from Hydra’s control, Bucky always looked tired. While everyone, including Steve, believed him when he claimed he slept through the night now, she knew it was a lie. She remembered what he was like at the peak of his days as the Winter Soldier in the Red Room, when he was nothing but a well-oiled killing machine the same as her. She remembered what a rested Bucky looked like, and he had not seen that face since she fled Russia. Today, however, he looked even more exhausted.

“I could ask you the same thing. Aren’t you supposed to be in Brooklyn with Steve?” she asked.

He took a seat next to her on the ledge and she handed off the vodka. To most people, sitting nearly at the top of one of the highest ledges in New York would be terrifying, but after the “incident” back in 2012, she had grown to like the spot. It assured her that the city was safe again, but Bucky just seemed to be devoid of fear completely.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on a farm with Clint?” he grumbled, kicking back a long swig.

If he had been anyone else, she would have pushed him off the ledge, but instead she shrugged.

“It wasn’t my place to intrude. What about you?”

Bucky looked down at his shoes.

“General Ross and Nick Fury had important business in Vienna for Captain America, and since my last encounter with Ross did not go so well, Steve insisted I stay here.”

Natasha bit the underside of her lip. She knew Steve would go through hell and back for Bucky, so if he was willing to leave him behind on Christmas, whatever Ross and Fury had to say was larger than life. As much as it hurt, at least she had chosen to be apart from her best friend; Bucky had been abandoned by his.

“You know,” Natasha offered after a few minutes of silence, tucking her legs up into a cross legged sit. “When I went out to get coffee this morning, I noticed the Christmas tree lot down the street still has a few Charlie Browns left. Want to go get one?”

Bucky shrugged.

“It won’t be the same…but it’s better than nothing.”

“I know, James,” she said softly, patting him on the shoulder as she rose to her feet.

She had to wait for a while before Bucky even shifted his eyes from the skyline. Becoming a part of the team had not been easy on him, especially with her around. He insisted time and time again that things between them were okay, but much like his sleep habits, she could tell when he was lying through his teeth. While Steve was the living embodiment of everything Bucky used to have in his old life and was striving to earn again, Natasha was his opposite. In the last six months he had barely looked her in eyes for more than a few seconds at a time, because she was everything he was trying to forget. As much as she wanted to believe that what they had in the Red Room was real, that it reminded him of his humanity the same way it did for her, but it wasn’t fair to assume that. She had been a blank slate when they picked her up; he had to be wiped clean again and again and again. There was no telling what she really meant to him now, and she wasn’t about to ask.

The Christmas tree lot was only about four blocks away, but in the silence it felt like forty. Usually she was comfortable with quiet. Natasha had been on countless missions with Clint and Steve where they went for hours without talking, but this was becoming unnerving. Every time she glanced over at Bucky, his eyes were glued to the pavement right in front of his feet, his lips just barely moving, so subtly it was almost undetectable. Right when she was about to make a passing comment about coming up on the tree lot, he beat her to the punch.

“Natasha, can I ask you something?” he started.

“You know you can.”

He paused.

“What do you remember about us?”

She blinked a few times. Seriously?

“What do you mean?”

He sighed and shook his head in frustration. She wasn’t sure if the annoyance was at her or himself.

“I remember you being there, being younger. I remember feeling confused and different. I remember… hurting you,” he said, his voice trailing off.

Natasha pursed her lips. He really didn’t remember. A part of her was grateful. He already had a slew of horrible memories to cope with, he didn’t need to remember that the one scrap of love he had found in the midst of all his terror was the reason he suffered as much as he did. But the other half of her brain wondered if it would help, in some strange cathartic way. Maybe he could blame her, take out all of his anger and pain on her and finally start to move on. There was more than enough blame to put on her shoulders, and she would not begrudge paying for it.

“You grab a tree, I’ll get some coffee,” she sighed. “I’ll tell you everything back at the tower.”

***

Bucky made sure to sit quietly the whole time, not even drinking the coffee Natasha had bought him, only holding it tightly in his hands to absorb as much heat as he could into his human arm. Natasha, however, did not stay still for a moment. She spoke as she moved, explaining every missing gap in his memory as she rifled for decorations to put on their abysmal tree and decked it as best she could with improvised strings of popcorn and roughly cut paper snowflakes. Something about the whole situation made all the hair on his neck stand on edge. She had to either be saintly or permanently disturbed to gracefully carry out such pure and festive actions meant to bring joy while describing their whole story in such sick detail. He wondered what her secret was; how she could possibly have come to terms with all of this enough to retell it with no wavering in her voice or actions. As she had intentionally timed everything down to the second, she put her makeshift tinfoil star at the top of the tree just as she finished her story.

“I tried to go back for you,” she said, giving one last tap to the star to straighten it. “I spent years following any lead I could, but the trail went cold after Odessa. I’m so sorry.”

Natasha finally took a seat next to him on the couch and placed a gentle hand on his bare arm. He flinched. It was the first time he had felt her skin since… since Russia. Though it took him by surprise, at the same time he felt a sense of comfort. She was warm and familiar, and now he knew why. But it was not without guilt as well.

“Natasha, I…” He struggled to find the words. “I… destroyed you. How can you… how can you even look at me?”

He froze up as she trailed her hand up from his arm to the side of his face, running her thumb across his jawline and up to the edge of his bottom lip. He was not used to being touched, much less so intimately, but he wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and melt into her palm. After years of feeling so alone, after months of feeling lost if he went more than a few feet from Steve’s side, after feeling abandoned on Christmas, for a brief moment all of it disappeared.

“I loved you, James, more than anything else in the world. You taught me what it meant to feel like a real person. No matter what else happened, I will always be thankful for that.” She paused. “I bet this isn’t how you expected to spend Christmas this year.”

There was a distinct possibility that he had never heard a bigger understatement in his life.

“That’s for damn sure,” he said with a scoff. “But... I’m glad. I needed to be here with you.”

Nat let out a small laugh and pushed herself off the couch.

“Well, I might not be able to give you the same Christmas you’re used to, but I’m sure FRIDAY can pull up Miracle on 34th Street and I can run to the bakery to get some real cookies.”

Just as she turned to head toward the kitchen, he quickly reached out and grabbed her hand.

“Please don’t go,” he nearly begged. “I don’t need all that stuff. Right now, I just want you.”

Natasha flashed a warm smile that he knew he didn’t deserve, and settled back down onto the couch. At first he wasn’t sure what to do, what he could do, but he thanked God that he didn’t have to. Nat gently brushed a handful of hair out of his face and guided him down to lay in her lap, continuing to run her fingers around his scalp, lulling him into that place between sleeping and waking. He was still crushed he wasn’t home in Brooklyn with Steve, but Natasha seemed to pull the pain out of him one circle at a time. He regretted every moment he had avoided her, too terrified to learn what he had done to her in the past. He wanted to relearn her, who she was now, what she had become. What kind of friendship they could foster from their ashes.

“Hey, Natasha?” he said after a few minutes of silence.

“Yes?”

“Merry Christmas.”

She leaned over and planted a soft kiss on his forehead.

“Merry Christmas, James.”


End file.
